[lbo-talk] Nostalgia

Ian Murray seamus2001 at attbi.com
Wed Apr 16 12:04:18 PDT 2003


----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>


>
> All "that" does is answer your question Ian.

=======================

Sorry, it doesn't because it seems to me you hold to what Martha Woodmansee and James Boyle have called the romantic view of authorship with respect to Aristotle's theories, not to mention whether the key terms he used still have the same meanings today.


>
> I think Marx claimed that handicraft labour in precapitalist economies
> embodied greater techne in Aristotle's sense than labour characterized
> by "complete emptiness" (when measured against the labour of the
> "universally developed individual"). Marx claims the end result of
> capitalism ("the fully developed proletariat") will be the complete
> emptiness, in this sense, of labour. This claim is based, in my
> judgment, on a mistaken argument, but that doesn't invalidate the claim
> that precapitalist handicraft labour did not embody complete emptiness.

=====================

This begs the question as to what the rhetorical use of "complete emptiness" is supposed to accomplish and whether we can find some more suitable vocabulary to address the problems in the division of labor as it exists today.


>
> When you take Marx's "complete emptiness" of the "fully-formed
> proletariat" to be adequately represented by "proletarians who go
> bowling or play video games" you're making an interpretive claim. I
> believe the claim is mistaken for the reasons I've given. That's all I
> said.

=====================

Your reasons are also interpretations; we're at an impasse due, I believe, interpretativey, to the cumbersomeness of KM's use of Aristotelean vocabularies when we live in non-Aristotelean societies.


>
> >>
> >> The quotes around "idea" are meant to point to the Hegel/Marx idea of
> >> humanity as the being with the potential to become a "universally
> >> developed individual", the idea I've just again been elaborating.
> >> This
> >> isn't the only one. It's different from yours for example.
> >>
> >> Ted
> > ================================
> >
> > Compressing the lives of 6 billion -currently living- persons into the
> > term *humanity* as *universally developed individual* is an EXTREMELY
> > problematic narrative/explanatory project, grammatical problems aside
> > a la
> > Wittgenstein. Why is it whenever you bring that issue up all I can
> > think
> > of as an example is the Borg from Star Trek?
> >
>
> Perhaps it's the same problem that leads you to think the sentence
> preceding the question is an argument.
>
> Ted

===================

Never asserted that it was an argument, but it was an interpretation that implicitly assumed that KM's Hegelian vocabulary of "the universally developed individual" was a representation. How can we, who are not at the "end" of history [as if that phrase could even mean anything] possibly know what that is? To the extent we can't, anyone can claim that another's interpretation of what it might mean is wrong; all the while never having to put forth a positive claim, like the Yogis who use negative dialectics to frustrate the adept's attempt to conceptualize the godhead or a philosophy student trying to get a handle on Hegel's distinction between spurious and true infinity. "Not this, not that." Well, what, then? A rhetorical game that's moot............No wonder the pragmatists went after H's works as so much puffery.

Ian



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